The original programming model for Windows Azure applications was to use Cloud Services (originally known as Hosted Services, but still the same thing). Of particular note, Cloud Services run on VMs with disks that are not-persistent – you can write data locally (some pointers here), but any locally stored data is not guaranteed to stick around. This is a powerful model for some scenarios, especially highly scalable applications. Another feature of Cloud Services has always been that it comes with an emulator you can run locally – on your laptop at 30,000 feet was a common way to hammer home the point. (Remember, Cloud Services were announced in 2008 – a long time before we had wifi on airplanes!) There are actually two emulators: Compute – which emulates the Cloud Service model by supporting Web Role and Worker Role abstractions, and Storage – which emulates Blob, Table, and [Storage] Queue Services. The rest of this post will focus specifically on the Storage Emulator.

Since their announcement in 2012, Windows Azure Web Sites and Virtual Machines have been taking on many of the common workloads that used to require Cloud Services. This diagram at least conceptually should capture the sense that the when to use which model decision has become blurred over time. This is good – with more choice comes the freedom to get started more simply – often a Virtual Machine is an easier onramp for existing apps, and a Web Site can be a great onramp for a website that adheres to some of the well-known programming stacks running on PHP, ASP.NET, Python, or Node.js. If you are a big success, consider upgrading to Cloud Services.

Notably absent from the diagram is the Storage Emulator. It should be in the middle of the diagram because while the local storage emulator is still useful for Cloud Services, you can also use it locally when developing applications targeting Windows Azure Web Sites or Virtual Machines.

This is awesome – of course, it will be popular to create applications destined for Windows Azure Web Sites or Virtual Machines that take advantage of the various Storage Services.

So that’s the trick – be sure to take advantage of the Storage Emulator, even when you are not targeting a Cloud Service. You need to know two things: how to turn it on, and how to address it.

Turning on the Storage Emulator

If you create a regular old Web Site and run that in Visual Studio, the Storage Emulator is not turned on. Visual Studio only turns on the Storage Emulator for you when you debug using a Cloud Service, but this is not convenient.

Resources

The latest version of the Windows Azure Storage Emulator (v2.2.1) is in Preview. This release has support for “2013-08-15” version of Storage which adds CORS and JSON and still has all those features from years gone by…

A comparison of emulated and cloud storage services is also available. There are some differences.